Chapter 2 / Into the Light

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'I did that.' (Uri Geller aged six, after making the watch of a schoolfriend, Mordechai, advance by an hour)

Perhaps the story begins in Budapest, Hungary, in the 1920s, where a strikingly handsome young man called Tibor Geller was always told as he grew up that, although his family was devoutly Jewish, and his grandfather was a prominent rabbi, there was gypsy blood somewhere way back in the Geller line. A corny old family myth, perhaps, and one not uncommon in Hungary, but a point Tibor would often ponder later in his life, in a different place and very different circumstances, and wonder if it just might explain some things about his unusual son, Uri.

Or maybe the real start of the mystery can be explained only by Uri himself, because he alone was there when it happened. And immediately, we have our first problem in unravelling the enigma of Uri Geller. Family tales of Romany blood sound unlikely enough, but Uri's account of the genesis of his story invites scepticism from the first word. For one thing, it is the account of a child of four or five years old - not that Uri has changed his strange story in nearly fifty years. For another thing, everyone who recalls little Uri remembers a child with a famously fertile imagination, although significantly, not one who was a liar.

To put it at its baldest, Uri Geller is semi-convinced that he had a contact experience with extraterrestrial aliens in the middle of the day in a crowded quarter of Tel Aviv, Palestine, in a shady, walled garden which then existed on a spot now occupied by a modern, eight-storey branch of the Hapoalim Bank.

There is a characteristic bravery in Geller's sticking for half a century to this clearly profound memory of what we have to assume was something, even if it was not quite a close encounter with a UFO. Sticking to his guns over the memory has probably done this most image-conscious of men no favours, won him no friends, made him no fans or adherents, but he continues to insist it happened. 'Joan of Arc' recollections from childhood, as they are known, early visions of a flash of light, are quite common among people who go on to have highly unusual lives with a touch of destiny about them. The memories seem to be very similar. In around 1425, when she was 13, Joan, according to legend sat down under a tree once while tired from playing, only to feel her world fade away as a globe of light came down beside her and adult voices she later identified as being of Saints Catherine and Margaret and Michael began to speak to her about how she would lead France against the invading English armies. In the 1970s one of the best reputed 'remote viewers' - the US Army expression for psychics - the Americans had was a Vietnam veteran from Florida called Joe McMoneagle. McMoneagle's Joan of Arc moment came in an orange grove one night in 1957 when he, too, was tired and 'floated off' to be told by some manner of speaking light source that he would be a strong soldier one day, who would go off to fight a war but come back unharmed.

Uri Geller, speaking even as a 52 year-old multi millionaire with powerful friends all over the world, makes no apologies for his account of the apparent event. It occurred in the shady garden of an old Arabic house opposite the Gellers' flat, which was at 13 Betzalel Yaffe, on the corner of the busy Yehuda Halevi Boulevard. In the early 1950s as now, this was a noisy, vibrant downtown area, packed with characteristic Tel Aviv apartment blocks of four or five floors, alongside shops, offices and schools. Everywhere, there were scooters and motorcycles, hooting, people shouting and arguing in the streets, dogs barking, children laughing, old ladies scuttling, and delicious lunchtime cooking smells coming from every apartment. The buildings, like the cooking and the faces on the streets, were a kaleidoscopic mix of eastern and European, modern and very old indeed. Every few metres was another dark doorway, with a glimpse of a still darker interior. For such a built-up district, nature put up an impressive show. Tiny patches of intense greenery, palms and flowers, some growing wild, but much assiduously cultivated, somehow squeezed between the buildings and defied the burning heat of the day. The kind of gardens that Uri describes were mysterious, squirreled away places, secretive little holes almost impossibly tranquil in such a frenetic setting.

'The garden had a rough iron fence, all rusty, and inside, it was wild, with bushes and tress and flowers and grass,' he recalls. 'It looked like no-one had taken care of it for ten years. The day before this strange thing happened, when I was three, I had squeezed through a gap in the fence and found a rusty rifle. It was one of the happiest days of my year. It was real and menacing-looking, and of course when I took it out I tried to hit it against the floor to see whether there was a bullet in the barrel. Just then, a police car passed by. They stopped when they saw this little boy playing with a real rifle, and confiscated it.'

'The next day, late in the afternoon, I thought I would find another one, and that's when it all happened. I went back to the garden and I suddenly heard kittens crying. My first reaction was to find them. I was very small, so going into the tall grass was like a jungle. The next thing I remember, I felt something above me and I looked up and saw a ball of light. It wasn't the sun; it was something more massive, something that you could touch. It was really weird, almost like a plane, but nearer to me, above me. It was just hanging there. Then after some moments - I don't remember how long - something struck me. It was either a beam or a ray of light; it really hit my forehead and knocked me back into the grass. It was exactly like that scene in the John Travolta film, Phenomenon. I don't know how long I lay there. But I got scared. I ran home and told my mother. Maybe I'd stayed there for another minute, not thinking, not wondering, not understanding. At that age, anything and everything is possible for a child. To me, it didn't look like some kind of phenomenon or a paranormal occurrence or a UFO. It just happened. But because it was a bit threatening, because it knocked me down, I tried to tell this to my mother, and obviously she thought I was making it up. And that was the end of that. It never ever happened again.'

There is an alternative, slightly more earthly childhood incident which happened to Uri a short time after this, and has the benefit of a still living terrestrial witness to it in the form of Uri's mother, Margaret. And, this part of the story being of a Jewish mother and her only son, the incident almost inevitably involves soup.
'We were sitting down to lunch in the kitchen eating mushroom soup, or possibly chicken, I don't quite remember,' says Margaret Geller, who is now 85. 'All of a sudden, I noticed that the spoon in his hand was bending. I didn't know what happened. I thought he might have bent it on purpose as a joke, to make me laugh. And then he said he didn't do anything and, that the spoon got bent by itself. I just wondered. But I always had the feeling that he was not like other children. He very much liked, how shall I put this, to be independent and to boss around the other children, his friends. He was always the same, just like now.'

Uri's account of the soup spoon affair accords in its essentials with his mother's. He recalls initially dipping some white bread in the soup, and then placing the spoon in his left hand - he is left handed - and taking a few sips unhindered by any form of paranormal activity, his mother in his memory standing, in the style of every Jewish mother in history, by the kitchen stove. But then, as Uri was lifting a spoonful of soup to his mouth, the bowl spontaneously bent downwards, depositing hot soup in his lap, and then fell off, leaving Uri holding the spoon handle. He remembers calling to his mother to say, 'Look what's happened'. She replied with one of those things flustered mothers say; 'Well, it must be a loose spoon or something. 'I knew that was silly,' Uri says now. 'You don't get "loose spoons".
Uri Geller had been born in a small hospital in Tel Aviv at two in the morning on December 20th 1946, under the sign, for those who must know these things, of Sagittarius, The Clown. The birth was entirely normal other than in one significant and disturbing respect. Margaret Geller had previously been pregnant eight times, and on each occasion had an abortion because Tibor, who did not seem to believe in contraceptives, also oddly did not want children. Uri would not find out the extraordinary fact of his mother's multiple abortions - and that he might easily have been terminated foetus number nine - until he was nearly 40, and his mother quietly slipped it into the middle of an unrelated conversation. As an adult who believed firmly in life after death and reincarnation, it was as great a shock to Uri as it might have been to discover he was adopted. He had always felt he had some kind of guardian angel, and when he learned that he might have had eight brothers and sisters, the news made him wonder whether there was possibly more than one invisible protector there for him. Uri discovered on quizzing his mother that it had been her decision to say this time she was going to have the baby, her strength and determination to stand up to Tibor which brought him into existence.
However he felt about it, Tibor Geller seems to have accepted his fate as a father, for the meanwhile, at least. From what one can see from the Geller family photos, and nobody has spent more time looking at them with a critical eye than Uri, his father looked happy and content holding him at his circumcision, visibly proud that his first and only child had been born. Uri was named after a boy who would have been his cousin, who had been killed in a trolley bus accident in Budapest.
Uri maintains today that he is not angry with his parents about the abortions. He feels that if they had not happened, and his mother already had children when she became pregnant with him, it is most likely that he would have been aborted himself. And anyway, even if the war in Europe had been over a year, these were still highly turbulent times and unstable times in Palestine. Even in the late 1940s, Uri was effectively a war baby, born and brought up in a violent society, with an understanding of the emotional chaos war engenders.
Tibor and Margaret had married in the grandest synagogue in Budapest in 1938. Unlike Tibor's, Margaret's family was not very religious. She had been born in Berlin, of Viennese parents. Her family name was Freud, and if the Hungarian Gellers had gypsies to provide the exotica in their genetic makeup, the Freuds could point out that Margaret's grandfather was a distant relative of the great Sigmund Freud. (Tentative as it was, the connection with the father of psychoanalysis would one day come in useful to the then unborn Uri Geller. For the moment, it was no more than a matter of family legend and considerable pride.)
The Budapest Freuds owned a moderately prosperous furniture and kitchenware business. Much of Tibor and Margaret's courting was spent rowing on a lake outside Budapest in narrow racing sculls. Inevitably, they capsized from time to time, and once, Margaret got into difficulties with her leg trapped in the boat. It was only by swimming underneath the boat that Tibor was able to rescue her as she was drowning.
Almost as soon as they were married, the Gellers set about fleeing from the imminent Nazi terror. Tibor made his way into Romania in November 1938, and talked his way onto a ship bound for Palestine. It took four months to make the trip and three attempts to land under fire from British patrol vessels before he made it on shore in March 1939. Twenty of the refugees on the ship had been killed by gunfire on the long journey. Margaret had an easier emigration, escaping Hungary through Yugoslavia, and catching a ship there straight to Palestine.
The Gellers' story in Palestine, surrounded by the vicious three-cornered attrition of the time between British, Jews and Arabs, was very typical of that of thousands of early Israeli settlers - which is not to denigrate it, nor to pass over the stress and suffering of the Arabs and the British soldiers, trying as they were to police an unenforceable mandate. Tibor, having taken on the Hebrew name of Yitzhak, initially found work of a sort with a refugee friend who was a doctor, selling lollipops from a cart on the beach at Tel Aviv. He later worked as a taxi driver, running the gauntlet of flying bullets on the strife-torn road from the city to the airport at Lydda in a big old Chevrolet paid for, as most things would be in the Geller family, by Margaret's work as a seamstress.
Soon, Tibor was to discover that his destiny was as a man of action, and a military theme began to be woven into the family fabric somewhat at odds with his son Uri's later persona as a psychic, a vegan and promoter of all things alternative and New Age. Tibor joined the British Army soon after the start of the Second World War, and fought in the Jewish Brigade with the Eighth Army, under Montgomery. His tank unit was surrounded by Rommel's troops for several weeks at Tobruk in 1941, and he returned to Libya twice before the end of the War.
Perhaps it is unfair to Tibor Geller to say that he loved warfare, but it was unquestionably his calling, and there was all too much of it waiting to be waged in the post-War Middle East. He joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground militia, which would later become the Israeli Army, and, a dashing young military man, was away from Margaret most of the time. The abortions a closely-kept secret, she spent her time working as a seamstress, gossiping with Hungarian friends in Tel Aviv's strikingly middle-European coffee houses, and playing cards.

The sporadic street fighting and sniping in Tel Aviv did not stop because there was a new baby in the tiny flat three flights of cool stone stairs up on Betzalel Yaffe. The stairway of the apartment block even today has bullet scars in its light blue painted walls. In the 1940s, the streets of Tel Aviv were dangerous. Uri's first memory dates, he has worked out, from 1947, when he was about six months old. 'Our place was just a one room apartment with a tiny kitchen for an entrance, a big living room and a bed that would come out of the wall, which my mother had to build for me. Across the road from the apartment was the railroad station for trains to Jerusalem, and close to that was a British post, like a police station. I'll never know why but a British soldier shot two bullets into our window, but I was under that living room window in my pram, where my mother had put me. I remember the two shots, and I remember glass falling almost in slow motion. My mother had put a little teddy bear next to me in the pram, and somehow it rolled over my face and it saved me. Maybe I would have been cut up, perhaps even killed.'

With both his parents out for much of the time, Uri was afforded much freedom as a little boy, although his father, when he was at home and not off fighting, was a strict, militaristic disciplinarian. 'I remember that when I got out of bed, if my shoe was half an inch misplaced he would immediately tell me to correct that.' It was a demanding regime, but then again, Uri's father was rarely around. A neighbour was nominally looking after Uri when his mother too was out or working, but he was something of a street wise urchin, at the same time as being, by his own admission, a little strange.

When he was about four, a little after seeing the flash of light in the little Arabic garden, Uri remembers digging out the long-hidden British bullet heads from where they had sunk into the opposite wall in his bedroom. One was squashed up, having hit masonry, but the other had only penetrated wood, and was still shiny and rounded enough to spark off Uri's imagination. 'I used to go down the tiny little garden under the house, which was about ten square feet and covered with vegetation, and grass and flowers, and I would pretend that the little bullet head was a rocket, and that this was a jungle. I would pretend that the rocket was taking off and then landing on another planet. I don't know where I got these ideas from, as I was only four. We had no TV or radio. I don't think we even had comics in Israel then.'

He seemed to develop a space fixation, almost, he speculates today, 'as if something was implanted in my mind' during his Joan of Arc experience. He had started to draw detailed space pictures, with astronauts sitting in rockets surrounded controls and screens. 'Across our street was a junk yard of huge old water tanks, and there too, I used to fantasise. I used to crawl into one which was covered in big rivets, and pretend I was in some kind of capsule and was floating in space. My favourite childhood dream - and many people have it - was that I flap my hands and I could fly.'

By Uri's account two or three other strange phenomena began to crowd into his little world, aside from the alarming tendency of spoons and forks to bend when he touched them. The cutlery bending was occurring only occasionally, and apparently at random, but was frequent enough for his parents to become accustomed to it; their minds were so full of wartime worries about survival, that they seem to have demoted its significance as a scientific oddity. The first post spoon bending phenomenon to affect Uri would, after an unfortunate start, when it merely embarrassed him. within months make him a playground sensation at the kindergarten he attended around the corner on Achad Ha'am Street. Being the centre of attention immediately appealed to Uri, and his curious ability at will to affect watches and clocks in odd ways was his best vehicle for recognition - far more reliable than the fickle, unpredictable business of bending cutlery.
Uri's facility with timepieces, he maintains, had appeared as spontaneously as his spoon bending. Shortly after he started school, Tibor bought Uri a watch, of which the little boy was, naturally, very proud. Uri Geller was bored by school almost immediately, and the watch in some way acted as an externalisation of his listlessness. One day, he recalls looking at the watch and seeing that the class was over. But a glance at the wall clock showed there was still half and hour to go. Disappointed, he set the watch back thirty minutes and forgot about it - until the same thing started to happen fairly frequently, day after day. There is, of course, every possibility that nothing more was happening than a little boy turning his watch forward consciously or otherwise in an attempt to will time forward. If this was the case, Uri was prepared nevertheless to take matters further. He told his mother about it. The link between misbehaving watches and delinquent spoons was far from obvious, so she suggested there might be something wrong with the watch. In response, the watch, or perhaps Uri, contrived to start spinning four and five hours ahead at a jump. Suspecting it was a prank, Margaret asked him to leave the watch at home. For weeks, under her gaze, it behaved quite normally. So Uri began to wear it to school again. Still fascinated by the watch and convinced he hadn't deluded himself, he got into the habit of taking it off and leaving it on his desk, in the hope of catching it running fast.
The day he finally caught his watch at it, he shouted out in class, 'Look at this watch!,' and immediately wished he hadn't, because everyone laughed at him; he does not remember whether the watch was actually still racing ahead when he held it up, but whatever, the incident served as an early lesson that people could be very hard and sceptical, would not simply accept his word, and would not necessarily even believe what they saw in front of them. Back at home, he decided there was nothing more to it than he had a weird watch, and resolved not to wear it again. His mother said she would buy him a better one, and after a few months, she did.
Uri says he was relieved at having a regular, working watch this time, which did not do odd, unpredictable things, and told the correct time. Then, one day, the bell rang for the end of playtime, he looked at his watch, and saw that the hands had bent, first upwards, so they hit the glass, then sideways. Convinced, now, that this was the spoon thing in another guise, his instant reaction was to keep it a secret. When he got home, his father was on one of his infrequent visits and asked sharply, 'Did you open this watch?' Uri swore that he had not, and Margaret told Tibor about the peculiar things that had happened with the first watch.
Uri recalls Tibor and Margaret giving each other one of those despairing looks by which parents communicate a shared feeling of hopelessness about an errant child. Tibor had strongly suggested letting Uri see a psychiatrist immediately after he started vandalising, as Tibor was beginning to see it, the hard-up family's cutlery; now that the child had taken to ruining expensive watches too, he was all the more convinced that he had a very strange son. He was openly angry about Uri's mangled watch. Margaret took a different tack, arguing that whatever it was Uri was displaying seemed like a talent to her, so the visit to a psychiatrist never happened. Uri, on the other hand, was not given another watch for more than a year. (He finally gave up wearing watches in his twenties, he says, when too many incidents of them going haywire meant he no longer trusted one to tell the right time.)

The incident in the garden, the spoons, the intense space fantasies, the watches and even the humiliation of being laughed at in class, had convinced Uri even at this early stage in his life that he was special, possibly even on some kind of mission at the behest of a dimly-perceived superior power. 'It was real, it was vivid in my mind. I know to this day it was no childhood fantasy,' he insists. Life continued, however, and much of it was very mundane, happy childhood experience. 'I can remember two houses away from us was a tiny back room condom factory and we used to get into the back garden, where they would throw out defective condoms. We used to blow them up as balloons. I think we knew what they were. The first time I kissed a girl just behind that little garden. I was about seven.'
A few weeks after the showdown with his parents over the second broken watch, Uri was eating school lunch, when his friend, Mordechai, suddenly looked down at his watch and exclaimed that it had just moved an hour ahead. Prepared to risk all since he now had an independent witness with his own watch, Uri uttered what for him was a fateful short statement: 'I did that'. Mordechai, naturally, argued that he couldn't have done - the watch had never left his wrist. Uri asked if he could take it in his hand, and, he says, just looked at it and shouted, 'Move.' He made it jump two or three times, and by the end of the lunch break, had a crowd of excited boys proclaiming that Uri Geller had the most wonderful trick he could perform with a watch. The memory of Uri proclaiming in class that something had happened which only he had seen was forgotten. The boys could see this with their own eyes, and couldn't have been more impressed. Uri, of course, would like to have explained that, actually, as far as he was concerned, it wasn't a trick, but was something far simpler. Wisely, he did not venture an explanation as subtle or downright unbelievable.

But the trick, paranormal effect or whatever it was certainly rocketed Uri in his peers' estimation. Yechiel Teitelbaum, who was in Uri's class and now runs a Tel Aviv cosmetics marketing company employing 300 people, confirms this. 'He was always different from other kids, very strange,' says Teitelbaum, one of the earliest non-family, unconnected witnesses to Uri Geller's early talents. 'He did a lot of things not every child can do, things beyond understanding; he left the impression of someone amazing, very sharp, very strong, very, very popular. He was always the leader, even in the kindergarten. We were together from four or five years old. He was always doing incredible things with in the playground with wrist watches. I also remember there were stories about him stopping the big classroom clock, but in my memory it was the big clock in the teachers' room that Uri stopped. I don't remember him bending metal, but what left the biggest impression on me was something different. It was Uri's telepathia - how he would tell me exact things I was thinking about.'

An apparent ability for telepathy with people, and even, or so Uri claims, with dogs and cats, was another of the bundle of allied paranormal aptitudes Uri had been born with, or possibly had downloaded into his mind by aliens, or had learned to simulate by trickery - all by the age of five. From toddlerhood, he was apparently famed in the apartment building for being able to feed the ferocious local brand of feral cat down by the dustbins behind the pharmacy which occupied the bottom of the block, and have the cats purr and eat out of his hand. The human telepathy first manifested for Mrs Geller, as it did for Yechiel at kindergarten, with Uri's uncanny knack of saying things just before she was about to. This soon became yet another of the multitude of oddities Margaret learned to shrug off. 'She was accustomed to the idea of me being unusual,' Uri says. He would have premonitions which went down in family history as accurate; one apparently came to him on a visit to the zoo during which Uri felt uneasy and asked to leave. A few minutes after he and Margaret left, mother and son maintain, a lion escaped and spent some minutes running about terrorising the visitors. But then, for the first time, having a telepathic young son began to have its really practical uses.

Uri was in the habit of waiting up for Margaret to come home from her card evenings so he could say goodnight. Practically every time, she noted, he seemed able to tell her how well she had done, and precisely how much she had won or lost. Mother and son began to develop a system by which Uri's talents, whatever they might be, could be put to some practical use. And with this early childhood intervention in his mother's card games, we come upon the first major problem in unscrambling the Uri Geller story. One of the principal difficulties the study of parapsychology has faced since it began in earnest in the early 20th century - indeed, one of the reasons (although there are others far less rational) that parapsychology has spent decades in the lobby of science without quite being admitted into the main edifice - is what is called mixed mediumship. Or to put it at its most basic, the fact that some extremely promising psychic subjects are perfectly capable of cheating at the self same time as showing every sign of being genuinely psychic. Mixed mediumship was a paradox noted by the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen in the 1920s, when he interviewed an Eskimo shaman, a witchdoctor, called Najagneq - who, incidentally, claimed to have gained his powers after being struck by a ball of fire. Najagneq admitted frankly to the Dane that he used some sleight-of-hand conjuring tricks as an aid to getting people to believe in him, and thereby to assist their recovery from illness. Rasmussen asked if there, then, any 'real' powers involved. Najagneq, who we must assume was in the mood for sharing, replied: 'Yes, there is a power that we call Sila, one that cannot be explained in so many words.'

Mixed mediumship is, then, the idea that paranormal powers and deliberate illusionism sometimes co-exist in the same person, and might even in rare cases be different ends of the same stick. Such a concept is an absolute blessing for anyone of a mind to debunk the paranormal. The debunkers' argument, and it is not a bad one superficially, is that if an alleged psychic ever cheats, ever tinkers with the effects he produces, be it to please an audience, an experimenter or his mum, then everything he does or ever has done and claimed as being paranormal is instantly nullified. He is a henceforth a proven cheat, and therefore a complete fraud. In reality, as we will discover in a later chapter, a large proportion of stage magicians admit in private that they rely on such paranormal effects as telepathy (sometimes calling it sheer luck) alongside trickery - and that the majority of psychics are also quite well versed in the arts of magicianship. In reality too, the desire to cheat, to enhance what one can do by legitimate methods with a spot of deception, is common in many fields. In the 1986 World Cup Finals, Diego Maradona of Argentina, the greatest soccer midfield player of all time, knocked England out of the quarter final with a goal he knowingly scored illegally, using his right hand to push the ball into the England net; although this is used as an example of the Argentinian's tricky nature, it is rarely employed as an argument that Maradona was incapable of playing legitimately. In Uri Geller's case, there is substantial evidence, as we will see in his subsequent career, that like Maradona, he has the ability to do amazing things without resort to cheating. Yet from early childhood, the very nature of what Geller found he could achieve, in that it was close to what conjurors do by trickery, exposed him to the knowledge of methods of cheating. Sometimes, it is safe to assume, he happed on ways of deceiving audiences himself; other times, even today, magician friends, of whom he has dozens, will tell him of their methods. In an ideal world, perhaps, Uri would somehow un-know such secrets, but for all practical purposes, he is stuck with them.

When he was four or five, a good, if slightly wild, street kid in a Mediterranean city, it is a little unlikely that Uri was being tutored by magicians, and he had both the scope and the motivation to work out methods of augmenting his natural talents. Helping his mother financially was an overriding consideration for the little boy, a priority which he has never lost sight of; like most people who have been poor, he remains slightly obsessed with money and financial security. Margaret, as ever the natural leader of the family, was amazed at how well Uri could guess how successful she had been at cards. He was keen both to impress her, and to help the stretched family finances, so he developed a method of assisting her which was a perfect example of mixed mediumship. 'I had a system to tell her telepathically if someone was holding a joker,' Uri admits. 'But I didn't tell her telepathically, I would sit next to her and knock her knee. It's called kibitzing, when someone is playing cards and you sit next to them and you can see what they hold in their hand, and obviously, as an observer are not allowed to see what the others are holding because you are with that person. But I would look at the person she was sitting opposite to. She - they were all women - would have a full hand of cards and I would just know by looking at the back of the cards whether she had a joker or two jokers, and would tell my mother. They played for money, and that helped her income. I also helped her by telling her not to play cards on certain evenings because she would lose.'

Uri's powers, as he saw them, could apparently be used to his own benefit too. For a child used to wanting material possessions and not getting them - for a long time when he was younger, he had particularly coveted a model Jeep he saw in a toy shop but could not possibly afford - Uri developed surely the perfect gift. 'I discovered that I could use a visualisation technique to achieve certain things. For example, I love dogs and I just wanted a dog and I would visualise and fantasise about a puppy in my mind, daydreaming. I will never forget the day when my father woke me up in the middle of the night and said, "Uri, go to the balcony and look what I bought you." And I went out, and there in a little box was a puppy. It was almost like I had a personal Aladdin lamp in my mind, that I would wish or rub and it would make my wishes come true. The puppy was a little Arabic mongrel, light brown and white. I called him Tzuki, to sound like the Hungarian for candy. Sadly, a car killed him when I was six or seven, and it was my fault in a way. I had him on a leash I had made, and it just broke away and he ran onto the road and was killed in front of me. It was very traumatic. Both my mother and I cried all day. I only realised then how much I love animals. A few weeks later, my father bought me another dog, and I called him Tzuki as well.'

Uri seemed to choose what parts of his curious abilities he revealed to different people. He happily fooled around with their watches, but never boasted to his friends that he believed he could 'magic up' a puppy - even with his imagination, he realised that this wish-fulfilment thing he had could be co-incidental. It is not unusual, after all, for a father to buy a boy a dog. The one thing Uri never discussed or attempted to perform in the school playground was the bizarre spoon phenomenon, even though it was happening with increasing regularity, as often as once a week - and was seemingly coming under his control. Bending spoons was still highly unreliable for him, and to attempt it would be to risk losing the considerable status he had gained with his apparent power over watch movements. But the spoon bending had nevertheless begun to extend beyond the confines of 13 Betzalel Yaffe. Margaret's main pastime was drinking coffee and eating cake with her girlfriends. Uri would often go along with her, but alarming things would happen when he did. He would be quietly eating a piece of cake when spoons on the cafe table would start curling up. The waiters would quickly whisk them away, not wanting to give the impression the cafe used bent spoons - or indeed attracted naughty little boys as customers. Margaret would try to explain to her friends and the staff that such things sometimes happened when Uri was around, but the feeling that the handsome little Geller child was merely mischievous tended to prevail, albeit unspoken, and he just felt awkward and uncomfortable, as he could not explain what was happening.

Little boys are, of course, notoriously prone to embarrassment, and Uri's feelings of the time do not necessarily mean that his qualities were not appreciated. One of Margaret's Hungarian card-playing cronies was a younger woman, Shoshana Korn, who was at that time working in a hotel in Tel Aviv. They two met and became friends when Margaret - Manci to her friends - was pregnant with Uri. Shoshana, or Juji as she was known, became Uri's godmother.

'We were in a cafe on the corner of Pinsker and Allenby one day when Uri started to play with the spoons,' Juji recalls. 'He was five or six, and bent four or five coffee spoons double. 'I said, "Manci, I hope you have plenty of money to pay the cafe owner." Fortunately, the owner was amused. I said, "Uri, you're going to ruin your mother." He said, in Hebrew, that it just came to his head how to do this, but his mother wouldn't let him do it in the house. All the other people were amazed. And as well as being able to do these incredible things, Uri was very smart, too. He'd stop clocks and watches, too, but then he'd always start them again. Another friend of ours, Anush, said to Manci, "You know one day you won't have to work all night, because he's going to make a lot of money." Uri used to spend a lot of time with Anush and her husband, Miklos. I remember her saying you had to hide everything made of metal from Uri, because he'd bend it. Miklos was a handbag maker, and he would sometimes get very angry with Uri because he would bend his tools and the clasps he used. But then she'd say, "I don't know what to do with this Uri. He's a genius."
In spite of the drawbacks of feeling very different from other children because of the troubling powers he seemed to possess, and of sensing that people regarded him as mischievous and naughty (while more often they saw him as an investment), Uri still regards this part of his childhood as pretty happy - an only kid, bright, good-looking, reasonably indulged, if not materially spoiled. His life at this amusing-his-mother's-cronies-in- coffee-shops stage , nonetheless, was on the point of going septic. Psychic or not, Uri probably realised things were going wrong long before his father actually left the family, and was very likely a less happy little boy than he appeared to be. Perhaps all the strange phenomena which happened around Uri were poltergeist effects, which are said to affect unhappy children in particular; perhaps they still are poltergeist in nature, for much about Uri Geller even as an adult suggests a damaged teenager still affected by Tibor Geller's abandonment of him, still torn between adoring and idealising the man for his strengths and despairing of him for his weaknesses. Few middle-aged men can speak with such power about coming not merely from a broken home, but a ruined home.

With the heady background of constant war and the rumblings of the founding of the State of Israel as his mood music, it is, perhaps, hardly surprising that the suave and charming Tank Corps Sergeant Major Geller was unfaithful to Margaret on what may well have been a serial basis, as well as negligent in other areas of family duty. 'Uri's father was very, very handsome, but liked to fool around,' reflects Juji Korn. 'He didn't work too hard, and whatever he made, he didn't give them. That's why Manci had to stay up all night sewing aprons on her machine.'

Uri knew his father was seeing other women, partly because Tibor made the time-honoured and eternally puzzling philanderer's error of trying to engineer meetings between his child and his favourite illicit lover. Perhaps Tibor was trying to legitimise the liaison by seeking Uri's approval of her. He even arranged for one of his lovers to come round to their house to meet him. When she got to the apartment block lobby, instead of walking up and knocking on the door, she was cocky enough to whistle up the stairs for him. The subtle significance of this in Israeli terms cannot be underestimated; it is a tradition in Israel that family members and intimates - but not mere acquaintances - have a special whistle for one another to say 'I'm home', 'I'm over here,' or whatever. Margaret and Uri, for example had their own agreed whistling routine. Because she could not quite see Uri playing outside from the balcony of the Geller apartment, she whistle down three floors a few bars of the 'Toreador' tune, which he would return.

Even as a child, then, Uri was attuned to what was happening when a strange woman was whistling for his father, and he tried to make a noise so his mother would not hear her. He was only too aware of how hurt Margaret would be by it. On another occasion, Tibor was with Uri and had to make a call from a call box. Uri had never spoken on a telephone before, and was excited when his father let him hold the receiver and speak into it. Yet he realised he was talking to one of Tibor's lovers, he says, became tongue-tied and felt bad about it. It soon got that Uri preferred his father not to come home on leave because he saw the sadness he was causing his mother. The signs of the coming divorce between Tibor and Margaret were obvious even to a child.

'He took me once to a coffee shop on Dizengoff Street, and he looked so meticulous and handsome in his uniform and black beret with a tank on it and the decorations,' Uri recalls. 'I remember walking in front of him and being in the doorway, and everyone eating and chatting, and the clanging of the cutlery on the plates and the spoons stirring coffee. And as my father entered the shop behind me, there was a silence. Everyone froze. I could see it; all the women just stopped, because mostly women would go to have cakes and coffee. They stopped drinking and stopped eating cake and just looked at him. He had that kind of presence, and looked like a movie star. It was a fatal combination.'

The divorce came, of course, and Tibor eventually married another woman, Eva, with whom he stayed and whom Uri respects and kept in contact with. But he does not blame Eva for the break up of his parents' marriage. For that, he holds responsible firstly his father - 'I blame him totally,' Uri still says - and another woman called Trudi. 'That was the woman who actually tarnished and ruined my mother's life. There were others, many others, but it was Trudi who chased my father. She was obsessively in love with him and she managed to destroy the marriage.'

The break up is still a subject Uri and his mother discuss from time to time. 'My mother revealed something really touching when she was well into her eighties. She said, "You know Uri, I really now understand why your father didn't love me. I was always heavy. I was never thin, I was never attractive. I was very beautiful, I was gorgeous, I had a beautiful face and beautiful hair, but there were women around with great bodies."

'It's was so sad to hear my mother saying that. After 60 years, she realises. She sees all these TV shows like Oprah Winfrey, and all the debates about fat and thin, and how society dictates certain ideas about how men see women. And she finally understands, practically forgives him. She hated my dad, and she tried to incite me against him, and what he did to her. She never went into detail but I knew everything. And sadly, she went on to have really bad luck with men. Her second husband died. He had had a first heart attack, but he actually had the heart attack which he died of on my mother, making love to her. No wonder my mother never got married after that, and abstained from sex and never wanted to hear about men again. It was a double whammy on her. First my father cheating on her because she'd put on a few pounds, and then finally finding someone in her life and he dies on her.'

The final disintegration of the Gellers' marriage ended Uri's days as a Tel Aviv street kid. After a short while struggling as head of a one parent family, Margaret realised she no longer had the strength nor the resources to be a full-time worker and a mother. Although he recognised the marriage had become pointless, Uri had not taken the break-up passively. On occasion, especially when Tibor raised the question of sending Uri to see a psychiatrist over the strange happenings, Uri would become petulant and ask why he and his mother didn't see the psychiatrist instead.

Uri's behaviour at school too had beginning to deteriorate in distinctly non-paranormal ways even before the couple formally split up. One day, his teacher asked the class to bring in from home a Torah scroll, a miniature copy of the holy Jewish Sefer Torah, which most households in Israel tended to own. The Gellers, who were not remotely religious, did not have one, so Uri went to school the following morning empty-handed. He was immediately jealous of the other children, all of whom seemed to have a beautiful scroll. At recess, the children were told to put their scrolls under the desk. During the break, Uri sneaked into the classroom and stole an expensive white-covered scroll from under someone's desk. It was hardly the crime of the century in terms of skill, and Uri watched terrified from the balcony of his apartment as the teacher knocked on the front door of the block that afternoon. In a panic, as she walked up the stairs, he tore the scroll to shreds and threw it in the waste paper bin. It was obvious that he was the only suspect in the theft, and to make matters worse, Uri's father happened to be home that day. He would never forget the way his father looked when he learned that Uri had stolen a Torah, and turned it into a double crime by then destroying it. 'My father was never mean or vicious, but he whipped me that day. He took me into the bathroom and really whipped me.'

It got worse for Uri too. There was a girl in his class called Naomi, whom secretly loved and used to go to the cinema with to watch Tarzan movies; she refused to speak to him any more. The other children ostracised him as well. He would spend hours with just Tzuki Mark 2 for comfort. He was quite pleased when he was told that there were to be some new arrangements for him. It was decided that the safest, most stable home for Uri would be in the country, on a kibbutz, a communal farm. Margaret discovered that a kibbutz called Hatzor, far to the south of Tel Aviv near Ashdod, specialised in taking in children from broken homes in the big city. Here, for a small fee, but in reality for purely philanthropic reasons, they would be lovingly looked after within a settled, nuclear family, perhaps start to mend psychologically, and maybe even develop a taste for the simple, healthy country lifestyle. There was even a Hungarian Jewish family, the Shomrons, ready and delighted to take in the little boy from 13, Betzalel Yaffe. Uri was packed off to the country just before he was ten, in 1956.

Kibbutz Hatzor was beautiful and quiet, a Garden of Eden in comparison with the ferment of the streets of downtown Tel Aviv. But Uri Geller hated it. He missed home, missed his dog, and hated the kibbutz way of sharing everything; kibbutzim were run on firmly communistic lines in the fifties, which took some understanding for a city child. 'You have to understand,' says Nurit, the elder sister of the Shomron family, who still lives on Hatzor, 'For these children, it was like a punishment. They would feel guilty for, as they saw it, breaking up the family. Uri once said on TV that the kibbutz he stayed on was a terrible place. But then in the next sentence, he said, "My family loved me very much." And we did.'

The kibbutz was a few kilometres back from the sea, overlooking the port of Ashdod and only a few hundred metres from a busy Israeli Air Force base. It is not even set in particularly spectacular countryside, but in flat, hot fields, with industrial installations and pylons close by. But Nurit's mother, Tova, one of the founders of the community, had insisted from the start on planting beautiful gardens to counterbalance the functionality of the kibbutz, whose industries were cotton growing and aluminium smelting, and the occasional noise from the airbase, as heavy freighters and fighter aircraft took off and landed. Thanks to Tova's determination to beautify the kibbutz, it was soon an overwhelmingly peaceful little paradise of pines, flowers and lawns. Yet a few years before Uri's arrival, it had not been so tranquil. Within days of Israel's independence in 1948, the advancing Egyptian army, set on destroying the new state, had come within a few hundred metres of Hatzor, and ferocious land and air battles were fought around Tova's gardens before the invaders were beaten back.

Ironically, considering it was Tibor who had visited chaos upon the family, the location of Hatzor was more convenient to him than to anyone else. Not only was he was stationed at an army base just 20 km away, but he had the use of military vehicles to come to see Uri. For Margaret, Hatzor was an hour and two buses away - if rural bus tricky connections worked - but she still came regularly. Sadly for Margaret, she sensed that it was Tibor's visits which seemed to leave the greater impression on Uri. He would always come bearing some interesting military item for Uri, and things seemed a little happier between father and son. One such visit in particular forms one of his outstanding childhood memories. 'Just after the Suez war, which we could hear from the kibbutz, and I was very scared about, he had phoned to say he was coming, and I was waiting for him all day. I stood in the entrance to the kibbutz and eventually, from far away, I saw of a puff of dust, and that was his Jeep. He was unshaven and dusty and he had his gun on him. He looked like he had come from war, and I was so proud. He was safe, and it was so unbelievable that he came straight from the fighting.'

Margaret's visits were more awkward for Uri. She would always come smartly dressed and wearing lipstick, which the other children would laugh at. Beneath the surface of friendliness and the socialist ethic there existed quite a strong prejudice against the city children, the ironim, which made a homesick Uri still more miserable. There were certainly compensations in the kibbutz life. The kibbutz schooling was much easier and less strict than in the city. The kibbutz aluminium smelter had a yard filled with old aeroplanes, some of them military, there to be broken up. It provided an incomparable playground for any child with imagination. The little bit of farm work the children were required to do, such as orange picking, was pleasant enough. The food in the large communal dining hall was excellent and you could eat as much as you wanted, something Uri, quite a chubby boy, appreciated. Hatzor also had a huge outdoor swimming pool, and a children's petting zoo with rabbits, chickens, goats, peacocks and a donkey. For Uri, a virtually private zoo was a wonderful oasis. He would still go out at night, however, to look at the moon and think how the same moon was shining over Tel Aviv, and that perhaps his mother was looking at it.

Like a lot of town dwellers transplanted to the country before him, Uri was also a little horrified by the occasional violence of rural life. 'I had a bad fright once. We were picking potatoes, and I was pulling out what I thought was the stem of the plant, but I was actually holding a snake, which was curled around the plant. It was a bad shock suddenly to be holding this sleek, slimy living snake in my hand. There was a tractor nearby and I dropped the snake and shouted "Snake", and everyone was looking at it wiggle away. Then the guy on the tractor rolled over and cut its head off with a plough, and I really felt sorry and angry. I was sorry that I had made a live thing die because I alerted everyone that there was a snake.'

Uri lived, in the kibbutz manner, in a one-storey children's house which was attached to his schoolroom. His contact with his 'second family' as the host families on Hatzor were called, was therefore relatively limited. But he rapidly became fond of the Shomrons, and they with him. 'My memory is mixed with what my mother told me about him, but I do remember him being a very beautiful child, with a lot of imagination,' says Nurit. 'Tibor, I remember as tall and charming, always in uniform. He was about 40, which seemed old in my eyes. According to Uri's stories, he was a hero, but people used to gossip, as a reaction, I think, to the wonderful things Uri told about him, that he was just in the administrative part of the army.'

'His father used to buy him a lot of sweets, and Uri was naturally supposed to share everything with Eytan, my brother, who was Uri's age. But Uri would hide his secret little box of sweets and refuse to share. Yet for me, that was understandable. It was all the love he got. He could go to that box and feel the love of his parents, which he missed so much. His mother, particularly, was lost after the break up of the family.'

Tova Shomron was the one, as Nurit puts it, who was in charge of emotions in the family, and she gave a very good impression of loving Uri like a son, even though whatever she gave him, it inevitably couldn't be enough. 'I think it was Eytan, the middle child, who felt deprived. but instead of getting angry with his parents for allowing Uri to join the family, he would get mad with Uri,' Nurit explains.

Even if he did resent Uri Geller, Eytan Shomron became his close friend, which was a big thing for Uri, because he was not enormously popular among the other children. In the way simple, unsophisticated people will, the run-of-the-mill kibbutz children scoffed at Uri's imaginative stories and called him a liar. Eytan was a little different, a little more sophisticated himself. Today, he is a melon farmer in the Negev desert, but also a great expert on - and friend of - the Bedouin Arabs. Eytan runs desert tours for tourists with an academic interest in the ancient, vanished Nabatean civilisation. Back on Kibbutz Hatzor, when he was ten, even if he secretly half-hoped Uri's stories of the big world, the sophistication and the miracles of Tel Aviv, and his tales of his father's acts of heroism, were untrue, he also hung on every word.

'We were good friends,' Eytan says. 'I don't remember there being any tension or problem with sharing my parents' attention with him. In a small community, on a kibbutz, it's not easy to be friends with someone who is not like everybody, who is exceptional, and Uri was exceptional. He came from the outside, and then became an outsider. He got this name for being a liar, but it's unfair. I can't put a finger on him ever lying.

In later life, too, critics of Geller would deride him with non-specific allegations of lying, while friends would maintain that he never lies. Another point of contention Geller's detractors would find endlessly amusing - not to mention highly instructive - would be his insistence that his psychic powers refuse to work unless those around him are friendly, if not actual 'believers'. Kibbutz Hatzor was the first place where Uri had found himself among rather unsympathetic people who were somewhat averse to him personally, strongly averse to anything other than the black-and-white, here-and-now - and positively against anything which smacked of religion, of unexplained, the paranormal or the supernatural. As a result, perhaps of the bad vibes, or perhaps of Uri's instinctive sense that he was not going to find a receptive audience amongst these people - he puts it down simply to the fact that he was depressed and unhappy - nothing 'strange' happened to him or around during his entire year on the kibbutz.

Well, almost nothing. There were odd incidents, which ensured that the rumour of the Geller boy's psychic powers was not entirely unknown on the kibbutz, even if they were not given much credence at the time, and tended to be elaborated upon by others only after Uri Geller became world famous. A story went around, for example, that he accurately predicted an air crash at the neighbouring base a few hours before it happened. 'My brother Ilan remembers Uri telling him that an aeroplane was going to crash tomorrow, and it did,' says Eytan. Uri, curiously, remembers saying in class one afternoon only that he though 'something' terrible was going to happen, not that it was a crash at the airbase just beyond the wheat fields. 'I suddenly something very powerful in me, almost like a feeling of running out of the classroom. A very short time afterwards, we heard this huge bang. We all ran out of the studying bungalow and across the cornfields we saw smoke and we all started running towards this jet on the end of the runway embedded in the ground and the pilot inside with blood all over his face. It was quite something, the first time in my life that I encountered someone dead or dying. Actually, he survived and months later, he came over to see us and tell us about it.'

As for spoon bending and interfering with watches, Uri did very little on the kibbutz, and certainly nothing at all for his closest friend, Eytan, who only saw Uri bend a spoon for the first time some 40 years later. When he did finally see the spoon bending, Shomron was probably more astonished by it that he would have been as a child. It is almost as if Uri sensed even as a child that if he left it for a few years, he would eventually have a far greater impact on someone he was really keen to impress. The result is that in his fifties, Eytan became a firm believer in Uri's powers. At the time, however, the whole idea left him cold. Many years after Uri left Hatzor, and was beginning his stage career, Nurit and Eytan noticed that he was performing one night in a nearby village. A group of the kibbutzniks trooped along to see the show, but Nurit and Eytan didn't bother. As fond as they were of Uri, they didn't believe the stories of his powers, and were not interested in magicians' shows.

At least one former kibbutz child, however, has a very vivid memory of Uri giving him a brief preview or glimpse of what he was capable of. Avi Seton, a year younger and now a management consultant in Portland, Oregon, was walking with Uri from the dining hall to the swimming pool one day when Uri suddenly said to him, 'Hey, look what I can do.'

'Uri took off his watch and held it, and the hands just moved without him doing anything. I'm not sure if he was sophisticated enough at ten years old for some kind of sleight of hand to be involved. and I clearly saw them move. For some reason, I got the feeling then and now that it wasn't something he could really do, but rather something that was happening to him. But the funny thing was that all I said when I saw this was, "Hey, so what." I think it was always going to be like that for him when he showed these things to kids. "Hey, that's good, but you want to see how high I can jump.' Why should Uri have chosen Avi to show him his secret ability? There are two possible reasons. The first was that Avi was reasonably friendly with Uri, and had once actually rescued him from a probable drowning when they went swimming together in a rough sea. The second, although it is hard to know how Uri could have appreciated this other than by some over-developed childhood instinct, was that at ten, Avi was already somewhat more open-minded than the average kibbutz kid towards the new and the unexplained. Which was why, although he has never seen Uri bend a spoon or do anything else out of the ordinary, he still feels at 51 quite sure that what Uri showed him was an example of a true psychic gift rather than a rehearsed trick.

Eytan Shomron believes all the time they were together back in the mid fifties, Uri was desperate to try to give his friend some indication that there was more to him than he had revealed. 'I remember once walking on a dirt road in a field of wheat when Uri asked me, if I had the ability to know where the snakes are hidden in the grass, would it make me feel better. There were a lot of snakes, and they were extremely frightening, but I said, "No, I wouldn't want to know." It was such a strange question. Years later, I thought it was an attempt to hint at what he could do, to signal to me that he was sitting on a secret. I think Uri Geller lived in two worlds. He tried to share his imagination with people, but they couldn't accept it.'